Hollywood has come a long way since 1914, when Sam Lucas was the first African-American actor to have a lead role in a movie (Uncle Tom's Cabin).
Now we are lucky enough to have stars like Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, Halle Berry, Wesley Snipes, Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Foxx and others carrying movies by themselves, playing to both white and black audiences. But the studio heads and producers are mostly white, and you can name the prominent African-American directors on the fingers on one hand.
Still, progress is progress, and it's a great lesson for us to take a look at the careers of people like Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Stepin Fetchit, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Paul Robeson, and Hattie McDaniel in order to understand what has happened in the past century.
Fortunately, the Web offers us a great number of excellent resources in this regard. And many of the movies are still available for us to see, along with documentary films on the subject. One of the best of the latter is 1998's American Movie Classics feature, "Small Steps, Big Strides: The Black Experience in Hollywood (1903-1970)," which helped me with some of the original ideas for this article. The title of the documentary is based on something Bill Robinson said when asked a question about the kind of roles he chose to play.
If you're ready to take another step in the journey, this article contains some excellent resources that you can utilize on the Web, divided into four sections, as shown below (this page is the Introduction).
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Recommended Web Sites on African-Americans and Hollywood
Part III: Leading African-American Actors, Actresses, and Filmmakers
Part IV: Significant Classic Films With African-American Stars or Racial Themes
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